


almost familiar

by very_mhairi



Series: maybe in another universe [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Babies, Bright King Mollymauk, Children, Empire King Caleb, M/M, Multiverse, Mutual Pining, Really Bad Stealth Rolls, Trans Male Character, Xhorhas, Xhorhasian Royalty, alternate caleb and molly are dads guys!! they're so happy!!, alternate caleb and molly are silver foxes ngl, king caleb is a trans man, rift hopping tutorial universe, slowburn, stealth - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 17:38:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19795771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/very_mhairi/pseuds/very_mhairi
Summary: After receiving their quest from Keeper, Molly and Caleb step through the rift and into their first alternate universe: a strange fortress of eternal night.





	almost familiar

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! I was absolutely honored to write the first AU piece of the "maybe in another universe" series! We've got about 17 super amazing critrole authors and artists working on this series, and I'm so excited for all of this. If you haven't already, you'll need to read the introduction/prologue to the series by littlelimey before reading this work (the introduction can be found at the beginning of the series or [here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19743952)). I hope you enjoy!

Molly blinked, and he was in a library. 

He stumbled slightly like he’d missed a step on a grand staircase when his foot left the rift and landed on the grey flagstones of a huge, empty room, and he took his first breath of fresh air. Well, maybe fresh was the wrong word—it wasn’t cave air, thank the gods, but it was heavy with old incense and smoke, mingling with dust floating past beams of moonlight that streamed through large, cathedral-like windows. The small light glinted and gleamed on veins of molten silver in between the stones in the floor, creating geometric, yet smooth designs that swirled around a few empty tables, scattered amongst the towering bookshelves.

A thin stream of smoke lazily rose from an extinguished bundle of incense sticks at one desk covered in thick tomes bound with what looked like grey leather, and he crept to it, running his hand over the polished, deep purple wood table with a singular cushioned chair. He heard sudden footsteps behind him, breaking the heavy silence, and he whipped around as he saw Caleb also tripping through the gap in spacetime that they’d left. “Mollymauk?” 

“I’m here,” Molly whispered back, glancing around the library again, and it was only then that some of the tension left Caleb’s shoulders. “I think you’re alright to light this place up, I don’t see anyone but us. It’s nighttime here, I think.”

A moment later, three globules of pale white light drifted from Caleb’s hand, their own little stars in the black night of the empty room. “Where is ‘here’?” Caleb hissed, his eyes widening as his lights floated upwards, revealing the stacks and stacks of bookcases. Molly opened one of the books on the recently-abandoned desk and flipped it open, squinting at the pages upon pages of runes and glyphs. Fuck, they were spellbooks. Was this whole library spellbooks? Surely not. Still, the tome in his hands was near-indecipherable to him, besides notes in the margins, small things scratched in an alphabet that he recognized as Common, though the handwriting was atrocious. Still, he cursed the fact that he’d never learned to read—a more common occurrence since he’d started traveling with the Nein, though he’d never admit it.

He closed the spellbook and put it aside. “I don’t know,” He replied, looking into the arching rafters of the building. “Keeper said he was sending us to different universes, right? This doesn’t… _feel_ much like a different universe. Everything here seems pretty normal, just… dark. And cold.” Molly could feel the chill of the room creeping up his spine, and he hated it. He tugged his coat closer around himself. 

“ _Ja,_ feels like home…” Caleb murmured, and there was a distance in his voice that Molly couldn’t place—didn’t have time to, anyway, before he saw him reaching for one of the books on the table, and he half-skittered across the smooth floor to slide in front of him. “We don’t have time for this,” He said quickly. “Beau told me what it was like escorting you through a library once before, and I am _not_ putting up with that myself. We need to find where we are, where these rift-things are. No books.”

“But—”

He put his hands on Caleb’s upper arms firmly. “No books.”

Caleb sighed heavily, and stepped away from the table, despite the temptation and some strange feeling, deep inside, that felt like a tether pulling him forwards, towards them. It was unsettling, to feel drawn to them physically, with a deeper need than just his hunger for knowledge. He carefully set the growing dread in the pit of his stomach aside to examine for later. This whole place felt horribly _familiar,_ in the worst ways—every other moment he expected to turn and see Astrid’s face instead of Mollymauk, expected to feel the oppressive gaze of the Archmage on his back. This room felt ominous, it felt official, and the smell of ancient, carefully preserved tomes and heavy inks gave away that it was a spellcaster’s territory. He kept his ears peeled for the sounds of a familiar lurking amongst the stacks, watching.

Another reason why it felt so wrong, besides the lurking familiarity, was that his internal clock had settled normally, and told him confidently that it was early evening, barely sunset. Yet there were stars outside the gigantic, gothic window at the center of the t-shaped room, and gentle moonlight illuminated the edges of the room that his Dancing Lights could not reach. Molly took Caleb by the wrist as he stared outside in bewilderment, and tugged him away from his near-trance towards a large set of intricately carved wooden doors. He felt a weight in his coat pocket warm slightly, and he paused before Molly could open the door.

Caleb took out his half of Keeper’s stone from where it had found a home in the pocket nearest his spell components, and watched it pulse with dim, warm light. Molly rifled through his pockets and pulled out his own, watching it match the slight, intermittent pulses, like the gentle thump of a heartbeat. “That’s probably a good sign?” The tiefling suggested, turning it over in his palm quizzically. Caleb pursed his lips and sighed, placing it back in a pocket closer to his heart, safer. “Then I suppose we’ll be playing a _game_ with Keeper to find his rifts.” Caleb said, with some vague distaste. 

_Do not make the same mistakes I did._

No use in wasting time, then. “Let’s follow.” Caleb moved carefully past as Molly looked over his stone for a moment more. He carefully, gently pushed the door open, peering out into the hallway beyond. He wished he could disguise himself first, but he had no fucking clue where they were, and what disguises would or would not fit in. “Caleb, Caleb,” Molly tugged at his coat sleeve. “If anyone sees us, you have your Suggestion spell, right? How long does that last?” Caleb thought for a moment, gnawed at his bottom lip in a way Molly had begun to find all-too-endearing. “Ah, an hour or less, depending on how long I can concentrate.” Molly shifted from foot to foot, taking in air through his teeth, but huffed. “It’ll do. Lead the way.” He tucked his stone back into his pocket, and the Dancing Lights hovering over their heads extinguished. 

Caleb’s gaze scanned over the hallway in front of them. They were at a junction, another t-shaped area with the doors at the intersection of both halls. They seemed mostly empty, spare a few wandering figures in mostly white or silver robes. Dread clawed at the base of his spine as he realized most of the figures seemed to be drow, give or take a few half-orcs, one tiefling, and even a goblin or two. 

He pulled back from the door, letting out a shaky breath. “What? What is it?” Molly immediately pressed, trying to peer back out where he was looking.

“I’m starting to think I know where we are, and that is _not_ good for us. Do you have a way to disguise yourself? You are very… bright. Neither of us fit in.” 

Molly shrugged. “I’ve got my Disguise Kit, but that’ll take time, and might not work as well.” 

Caleb cursed quietly in Zemnian, and gently pushed the door open just a crack to look at the passing figures again. “It might be worth a try. There is a chance that _we_ are also here, and we do not want to be mistaken for thieves or the like because we are duplicates. And you are hard to miss.” 

He chuckled in reply, pulling the door shut. “That’s how I like it, you know that.” Caleb smiled to himself, opened his mouth like he had something to add, but said nothing, only shaking his head. “Look,” Molly managed, running a hand back through his hair. “Without some kind of illusion, I can’t get rid of my horns, or my skin tone. I can try to change the shape of my face, cover up my tattoos, but there’s only so much I can do. I’m not sure if it’ll make much of a difference.”

Caleb sighed heavily. “Then let us leap into the breach, _ja_? We should not waste time.” He murmured a few arcane words and in a moment, he was a slightly taller drow elf, with white hair and higher cheekbones, dressed in those simple white robes. He modeled himself after high-ranking elves he’d known before, just with modifications to suit dark elves, to seem regal and untouchable. He shifted awkwardly, hating the persona he was about to take on, and wishing it fit the persona to have a bengal cat around his shoulders.

He pushed open the door with little hesitation, wanting not to be questioned, and turned right like he knew what was down the hallway, sticking to the side but making sure to stroll with purpose, with a haughtiness that spoke of status. Molly already missed his wizard, with his usual slouch and layers of dirt, as he darted to keep pace with him. He took a breath, examining his surroundings. Thankfully, no one seemed to be coming towards them down the hallway as they walked briskly in silence, and the two of them had the chance to look around in the light. It was dim, but lit periodically by blue-white lanterns attached to the clean, crisp-cut walls. Everything seemed new and alien, unlike anything he’d seen on his trips around the Empire. Rivers of silver continued to run through the floors, and Molly felt incredibly out of place in the monochrome around them.

“Caleb, I’ve never seen anything like this,” The walls, when they weren’t smoothly and expertly cut, occasionally were decorated with large, stretching carvings of… he wasn’t sure what. Battle scenes, mostly, though some seemed to be on a grand, godly scale, including creatures of immense size against divine light from a vague figure, and some seemed to be small, battle scenes of foot soldiers at war. It took a few moments for Caleb to begin noticing the Empire symbols worked into each carving, and a few moments after that to see that they were always included on the _losing_ side of the battle images, or along with these demons and devils. He stopped, once, to trace the outline of a flag flying above an immense but fracturing army, and felt over the symbols of his own home.

Molly kept walking, and a few moments later stopped for his own reasons—a symbol, cast in glittering nickel, in between two of the carvings. Beautiful, larger than his head, and clearly a simple, sharp symbol of a dodecahedron.

He looked back to Caleb, eyes full of confusion and doubt. “...Where _are_ we?”

There was a pause, and so many emotions flickered over Caleb’s disguised face that Molly even had trouble getting a basic read in those few, millenia-long moments. “Best to keep moving,” He mumbled, picking up the brisk pace again and nearly leaving Molly behind.

The hallways narrowed, became even less populated, and the carvings dropped off, replaced by more and more doors, just singles, carefully made of either dark, chocolate brown or a deep purple woods. They could occasionally hear the murmur of voices behind them, the distant sounds of synchronized footsteps, and Caleb wondered what this compound even _was_. A castle? A fortress? Both? They were both so lost in their thoughts that they barely paid attention to the people that could be around each bend in the seemingly unending hallways. 

So when they walked around a particular corner, following the gentle warmth of the stones in their coats, Molly immediately had to jump back as he was near face-to-face with himself. He stumbled back into Caleb and pressed the both of them against the wall so they weren’t seen, holding the jewelry on his horns so it wouldn’t jingle with the movement. There was a moment where he just looked back at the puzzled wizard beside him (who had not seen his own double and was not freaked the fuck out), before he dared to peer around the stone wall, Caleb’s head following a moment afterwards.

It was definitely him (to be fair, there aren’t many purple tieflings running around most days), but… well, the first adjective that came to mind was _rich_. He supposed it made sense, considering what they were surrounded by, but it was still so jarring. He was dressed in beautiful grey robes and silver-white ceremonial armor, made of a material he didn’t recognize but certainly seemed to be worth more than his own life—“Mithral,” supplied Caleb’s quiet, awe-struck voice behind him. That Molly’s hair was long, braided down his back with white flowers, and he wore a glittering circlet made of that same ‘mithral’ material. Strings of what must be diamonds ran between his horns, and his tail was pierced carefully with little silver rings and glittering studs. He was older, definitely, with the beginnings of wrinkles on his brow and around his eyes, with grey beginning to streak through his dark hair, but he was breathtaking. 

The older Molly, the royal Molly seemed to be just wandering through the hallways, lost in thought. Gods, he looked _academic_. Caleb prayed that neither Molly could hear the way his breathing had picked up just slightly. He seemed like an easy target to sneak by: he was just wandering, not focusing, moving away from them. Soon he wouldn’t even be in this hallway anymore. Nice and simple. No time travel problems here.

Well, it seemed like it, until the other Molly’s face absolutely lit up. “Good evening, my sunlight,” He said in a tone absolutely dripping with fondness to the point that both of them found it almost sickening, and a moment later, a Caleb that he could not mistake for his own in a million years rounded the corner _smiling_. It had to be the smile, wide and bright and genuinely happy, that made him look so wrong, he realized. 

It was definitely Caleb—he still had his rust-colored hair, his pale skin dusted with freckles, worry lines on his forehead and a spellbook in his hand. But his rust-colored hair looked soft, well-kept, and clean. It shone dully in the low light of… wherever they were. But the hair was trapped underneath a golden crown, one that matched the sweeping golden robes he wore, glittering and covered in—was that _gold velvet?_ It was gaudy and such an obvious display of wealth that it was near ridiculous, but he looked amazing, the robe tied perfectly around his waist to make his skinny form look lithe and svelte. Molly was sure it was supposed to make him look etherally attractive. He was trying to grapple with the fact that it was working.

“What is he wearing _,_ ” Caleb hissed, not even bothering to disguise his disgusted face. “It’s hideous.”

“It’s amazing,” Molly whispered back, absolutely giddy with it. “Both of the outfits are fucking spectacular, Caleb. I would kill for that robe.”

The other Caleb and Molly didn’t notice their whisper-bickering as Other Caleb walked up and kissed Other Molly deeply, which made the both of them shut up immediately anyway. “Meren wants to see her papa before she goes to bed. She’s decided to give me the ultimatum that you have to come tell her a story, or she will never sleep again. She’s very convincing,” The royal Caleb hummed—yes, they had to be royalty, this had to be a castle—as he pulled away from their kiss. “She wants to hear more stories about the Nonagon.”

Other Molly groaned. “Really, I don’t remember everything from that life, I doubt I ever will. She just likes to imagine me as some ultra-powerful military general. She only likes the war stories.” He rested his hands on the other wizard’s waist, and Caleb gave him a sad smile in return. “Well, those are the most interesting ones, aren’t they?”

They couldn’t see Other Molly’s face from this angle, but it couldn’t be happy, with the quiet but heavy sigh he gave in reply. “Why should I have to tell her war stories? So what, I was a general two lives ago. That woman fought in a war that we ended. We grew up in countries killing themselves over that war, and then we fixed it. We won the war for _us,_ and our future. I don’t want to tell her stories of war. We have the entire Dynasty to offer her. I want her to be a normal kid for a few years, Caleb.”

Caleb was stammering quietly. Molly was completely without words.

“She was born into Den Kryn. She can’t be a normal child. Is it really better to hide that from her? It’s our history. I’m not hiding how weak I am, either,” Other Caleb said, and Other Molly made a choked noise. “She doesn’t need to know when she’s _six_ , Caleb! She should worry about the politics of her doll house and carriage racing, not about rebellions in Talonstadt or what illness will kill her _father_.”

“Don’t throw that back at me, Mollymauk,” Other Caleb warned, placing a hand on his chest. “I’ve many years yet, and… and Ikithon is gone. You know when I can say it, it has to be true. We watched the execution together. I am okay, even if occasionally the flu hits me a little harder than others.”

“I am okay,” The older Caleb repeated, leaning up and giving the older Molly a gentle kiss. “I understand. I do. I have my own paranoias. But I think Meren will turn out just fine even if she likes to hear about her father as a hero general in the Two Centuries’ War.” He laughed, and it was light and unhindered in a way that Molly had never heard his Caleb laugh before. “You have to admit it has a ring to it, my king.”

The other Molly leaned down and pressed a kiss to the crown of his head, letting out a small sigh. “Fine. But I’m going to tell different stories to Kit.” He said, with a firmness that even Molly knew was very final. 

“And I’m sure he will love every one, as well. Now go, or else she’s going to get out of bed and find you herself again.” The two of them laughed, and Other Molly murmured something to him in a language neither of their younger counterparts understood, before he continued walking the way he had originally been going, just with more purpose. The other Caleb left, lingering, and in a quick glance around, his eyes met with the drow elf who had been eavesdropping. His eyes narrowed. “ _Hallo_?” He began, and Caleb had already lurched back, grabbing Molly’s wrist. “Go, _go,_ _run, cover your ears,_ ” He hissed, and Molly barely had time to stutter out a question before he was dragging them back the way they came, his stone protesting with bolts of a punishing chill every few seconds.

“What? I don’t—cover my ears, what, Caleb—”

“He’s a _wizard,_ Molly, he’s going to _charm us,_ now go!” He pulled them down the hallway, Molly’s tail lashing behind them, and he didn’t dare look back as Caleb skidded to a stop in front of a simple looking door, yanking it open. Molly didn’t need instructions, he darted in, grabbing Caleb by the front of his coat through the illusion of robes and pulling him into the darkness of what seemed like a storage closet. There was a brief flash of light as Caleb touched the doorknob and then he stumbled back, only making it a couple of steps before running straight into the tiefling still holding his coat, half-turned, pressed against a shelf. The shelf wobbled with the impact, and the two of them both inhaled sharply, before it settled and it was just the two of them in the darkness, clinging onto each other.

Molly pressed his hands to his ears and covered them, taking a few deep breaths, and Caleb shut his as best he could, closing his eyes and praying to whatever god would listen that they were not found. He heard footsteps outside the door, and his own voice, saying a long, continuous incantation and _scheiße,_ this wasn’t going to be enough, he was still going to hear—

Caleb let his own ears go and immediately moved his hands to Molly’s, which made the tiefling’s eyes shoot open. “What are you _doing,_ I can barely hear him—you—whatever, I’m okay!” Caleb just shushed him as best he could, pressing him back against the shelf, trying to keep him safe and far away. Molly stopped struggling after the footsteps paused nearby, and the two of them held their breath. Shit, shit, shit, shit…

The footsteps continued down the hallway until they completely faded, and Caleb finally let him go, opening his eyes again and looking over at Molly. Molly, who was inches away from him, mostly pinned, close enough that their quiet, shallow breaths mingled.

There was a brief moment where the two of them just panted, coming down off the panic of the incident, staring at each other in the strange closeness. 

Then Caleb jerked back, letting him go and adjusting himself. “ _Scheiße_ ,” He groaned again, rubbing his forehead. Molly erupted in angry whispers. “Why would you _do_ that? Holy shit, if you get charmed I am done for. You could then turn around and charm me, too, if that’s what he wanted you to do! You’re smarter than that, Caleb, gods above.” Caleb just took the anger, deciding that was much easier than explaining the strange impulse he had to protect him, even though he knew that if it came down to it, Molly wouldn’t be the one that needed protecting.

If he moved on quickly, he wouldn’t have to face it. Ideally. “Okay, another version of… me is now on patrol. We’ve got to go before he gets back.” He walked the few steps to the door, undoing his Arcane Lock, and taking a deep breath. “The rift is in the direction of my duplicate or whatever and their—our children, Caleb, we’re never gonna be able to do this,” Molly protested as he put his hand on the doorknob, trying to calm himself down. 

“We don’t have a choice, Mollymauk,” Caleb hissed, a little too aggressively, already set on edge. “We’ll never get back to the others if we don’t.” Molly’s eyes narrowed, and he would’ve started an argument right then and there, but the door was open now, and they couldn’t afford it.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” He hissed back once they were walking, headed back to the hallway they were in before. “We need to talk about what we saw, Caleb. They are kings of… wherever we are, I’ve lived multiple lives? I mean, I have too, but that sounded different—we have children and a kingdom and you’re _sick—_ What is going on?”

“I think we’re in Xhorhas,” Caleb murmured in return, and Molly paled. “I think we are the rulers of Xhorhas, here. The dodeca, the silver, talking about a war and a Dynasty—I think Keeper sent us to a place where the Empire lost the war, and we rule the Kryn Dynasty.”

“Oh, shit,” was all Molly could even hope to say.

“You cannot be seen. They will think you are a thief trying to pass yourself off as a king, and you will be arrested, and I don’t know how to get you out of that when we are in what is supposed to be enemy territory. I cannot speak, they will hear my accent—gods know what these ones have done to the Empire citizens that they control—” Caleb was starting to raise his voice now, speak faster, caught up in all of the horror stories he’d been told of the war front in eternal darkness, of cruelty and slavery.

“Slow down, slow down. Caleb, you—the other you had your accent. I’d like to think that neither of us would kill the whole Empire or wherever your mind is going right now.”

_You know nothing about me,_ Caleb wanted to say, but shut his mouth. There was so much that the two of them said, so much to think about. _Trent Ikithon is gone,_ he had said in that horribly soft tone. Every piece of training, every word of propaganda that he had been fed was bubbling to the surface, and he had no idea what to think. It drove him mad. He was here, in the heart of the enemy, the nest of some terrible creature—shouldn’t he be destroying it? Shouldn’t he do what he was trained to do? Not for the first time, he found himself torn—how much of what he had been told was even true?

“Don’t get that look on your face,” Molly warned, and Caleb snapped back to the present. “You always get that look when you’re brooding. Focus. Come on.” He kept walking, faster now, back down the hall where they had overheard, going down the rows and rows of doors until the gradually warming stone, now practically burning against his skin, started to cool and chill. 

Molly paused, and Caleb paused with him. “Did we miss a hallway?” 

No, a quick look said, they hadn’t—it was just doors and doors. One, however, just a few steps away, stood partially ajar, a beautiful purple door with a small dodecahedron carved into the center. The two of them exchanged a quick look, and Molly carefully listened for any noise inside. No arguing, no bedtime stories, no patrolling wizards. Molly pushed the door open.

The room was dark and small, and it took him a moment for his darkvision to kick in, and then his breath caught. It was a nursery. A tiny nursery with a crib and a mobile, a small wardrobe, and a bookshelf covered in children’s books in what must have been at least four different languages. There were toys all over the floor, and they were well loved little things, scattered in rings and covered in bite marks and old stains. The stone in his pocket warmed again, even hotter than before, enough that he felt like it might burn a hole in his coat, but he couldn’t think beyond one thing.

“We should not be in here.”

An arched window did cast some moonlight in the room, but that was all the light Caleb had to see, so after stepping in behind him and closing the door quietly, he lit up the three small globules, the soft light easily filling the room. “We will be quick. This has to be it, we need to search.” 

Molly reluctantly nodded, but immediately stepped forward onto a wooden toy, which clattered under his foot, and he froze. His worst fears were confirmed when there was a stirring in the crib, and a baby began to cry. He cursed quietly, and Caleb’s eyes widened with panic. “I can’t—I don’t—get the child, you’re its father. I’ll look. Keep it quiet, please—”

“You’re its father, too—Caleb!” Molly hissed, but this was going to draw attention, fuck, gods… He didn’t have a choice. He stepped carefully around the other toys and looked into the crib reluctantly. He was good with kids, but this felt wrong. This felt so, so wrong. 

Still, he couldn’t help but feel himself soften as he looked inside and saw a small pale violet child, surrounded by soft toys, wrapped in white and silver blankets. It had two small nubs on its forehead that he knew would grow into horns when it got older, and when he reached down to pick it up, its screwed shut eyes opened to reveal two bright blue irises. Caleb’s eyes. “Oh, boy, hello,” The baby seemed to calm at the sight of its… it probably thought he was its father, and its cries quieted. He gently took the child into his arms, running on very little information on how to hold a baby and just praying it was enough. He could do toddlers and young kids, but infants were an absolute mystery to him. “Hi, sweet, you must be Kit, wasn’t that what your papa called you?” Molly cooed hesitantly, and the baby’s wide eyes seemed mesmerized by the movement of the charms on his horns. It reached up to grab at the jewelry, and he laughed a little. “Oh, no, that’s not for you. But they’re nice and pretty, yeah?”

It was absolutely terrifying how _right_ this felt: holding this child and rocking it gently, smiling as it yawned and started to relax again. If they were trapped here, would everything become natural, eventually? Would things settle into place, since he already felt so connected to all of this? Would they be forced to take on those roles, if they were trapped? Oh, gods. “Oh, you were just scared of the noise. That’s fine, you’re fine. Back to sleep, please,” He said with a slight edge of desperation, and he heard Caleb snort from across the room. “It’ll be okay. Back to sleep, that’s it. That’s okay. You’re just fine.”

“Molly,” He heard the quiet whisper from behind him, and he turned to look, still holding baby Kit. Caleb had pulled back the curtains where they covered one portion of the wall, and there it was: a gash in the wall darker than darkness, a huge crack that glittered and sparked with magic stretching from each end of the tear. The rift Keeper had sent them though was different, contained and stable or maybe even dormant, while this one seemed active, gave a dark hum that resonated through their bones. It looked unstable, too, the crack splitting into little extra splinters of light, new cracks ready to tear right open. Molly instinctually held the baby a little closer to him. “That was in here with the fucking _kid?_ Sorry,” he quickly added to no one, like the child could understand the curse. The edge of Caleb’s mouth quirked up in a smile he couldn’t suffocate, but it faded quickly as the starry tear in space seemed to groan and widen along the crack. 

The stone in his pocket pulsed with energy with every spark of the thin crack, and Caleb took his half of the lock out of his coat, looking over at Molly with a strange kind of sadness in his eyes that he didn’t recognize. “We’ve got to go. The child’s parents will be back soon.” Caleb said, a quiet reminder that he had no right to be attached at all to the child he was holding.

Still, he looked down at the child’s wide blue eyes, now closing with its exhaustion, and he couldn’t help but hesitate before gently putting the baby back in its crib. It didn’t stir again, though Molly moved one of its toys closer so it had something to hold onto if it woke again. “Right. Right, let’s go.” He spared one last glance to the baby, and then tore himself away, trying not to think about what could be. What _is,_ at least in this universe. It was far too much to consider, so Molly shoved it down to focus on the crisis at hand.

He fumbled for the relic in his pocket, bringing out the warm stone. “How do we do this?” He asked, looking at Caleb helplessly. “Why is it that Keeper had to be so damn vague?”

Caleb turned the stone over in his hands, and as it moved to his left hand, towards Mollymauk, it pulsed brighter. He pursed his lips, moved it a little closer, and as he slowly shifted it towards the stone in his hand, it sparked and lurched. Molly was starting to feel it now, a magnetic pull towards the other that the stone nearly vibrated with, and he glanced up at Caleb, meeting his calculating eyes. “Okay, I get it. It’s on theme by this point.” He muttered.

“Count of three, we’ll combine them?” Caleb offered. “At least to see what happens.”

Molly nodded. “Count of three.”

“One, two—” On three, the two stones were close enough that they nearly flew out of their grips, snapping together like powerful magnets with a loud thunderclap and a burst of bright light. The child in the crib, disturbed and frightened again, started screaming and weeping behind them. By the time the stars left Molly’s eyes, the unstable rift was fizzling out, slowly sealing until there was nothing left. Suspended in the air next to it was a new rift, large enough to step through, the same stable tear that Keeper had made for them before to step through. 

They heard a shout outside the room in a language neither of them spoke, and shit—they were heard. Loud footsteps, _many_ loud footsteps, thundered closer, and despite the strange instinctual need to calm the child, they couldn’t wait. They couldn’t be caught. “We need to go,” They said at the same time, and Caleb grabbed his wrist with that confirmation, yanking the both of them through the new portal before Molly could protest.

Time and space zipped neatly behind them, leaving nothing but a small dark line on the wall where the unstable rift once was, and a small child sobbing for its fathers. 

**Author's Note:**

> We've got a whole discord server full of starving authors--kudos and comments help feed us all! Enjoy this? Subscribe to the "maybe in another universe" series [here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1421506).


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